DRS2012 Bangkok Proceedings Vol 4 - Design Research Society

1650 Conference Proceedings
Drawing Out: How designers analyse written texts in visual ways
Figure 3: Thumbnail schema of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Designers generate thumbnail sketches to map out a document (print or digital), creating
a schema similar to the floor plan of a building or a tailor’s pattern. This schema allows
the designer to plan where compositional and graphic elements appear and to establish
rhythm within the layout (considering how design decisions affect the pace of reading and
comprehension of the text). A thumbnail schema helps the designer envision the
document as a whole – to make decisions about individual design elements in the context
of the whole document.
Although thumbnailing is generally used at the ideation stage of a design project, the
example above shows how it can be an analytical tool; deconstructing the composition to
reveal insights about how written and graphic elements relate. Could the placement of
graphic devices be related to printing specifications? 3 Is there visual rhythm that
orchestrates the placement of graphic devices? Of particular interest here is that a
thumbnail has the effect of ‘flattening the landscape’; it gets rid of all the cues a visual
person would be distracted by – typeface, line length and other compositional elements –
in order to think about a text as a map. This method analyses a written text by abstracting
it completely, revealing insights that may have been missed by looking at the book as a
‘codex’ – page by page, rather than as a schema.
The thumbnail schema is coded using different colours to represent different types of
image – see above. A single schema communicates the relationship between the written
word and graphic devices within the novel. Similar to Posavec’s diagrams, the schemas
also communicate further when compared to other schemas. Below, the schemas for
three separate books show the variety graphic type and frequency in different hybrid
novels. There is no ‘general formula’ for where graphic devices appear in hybrid novels.
3 Sections of specialty paper may be ‘tipped in’ so graphics are printed at higher quality, or colour
graphics may be printed only on certain pages to reduce production costs.